Subtracting dates

[bigfunkychief]

Hello,
I've scoured the boards, I'm still a little confused on subtracting dates. I have dates in MySQL which correspond to dates when problem tickets were open (helpdesk). I want to see how many days old the ticket is, (ie. today's date - opened date = number of days) and post in a table

Here's my code so far...(date in MySQL is format 2003-08-06)

<?php

$today=date("m/d/y");

$query = "SELECT * FROM data";
$result = mysql_query($query) or die ("Couldn't execute, man.");

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
extract($row);

$opendate = $row["calldate"];

/ From here I'm lost, I would assume my calculation
$today - $opendate = $daysopen
would be here...
/

/ Then my table goes here, displaying the variables pulled
/

}

Any ideas? Thanks in advance....
Scott

[yelvington]

Comparing dates can be a pain. I've found that the simplest approach is to convert them into Unix time values, calculate the difference (a simple matter of subtraction), and then convert back as necessary.

strtotime() is your friend.

$tstamp = strtotime($timefrommysql);
$now = time();
$diff = $now - $tstamp;

Now you have a value showing the number of seconds (!!) old the item is.

You can do the math to convert that to days ....

[bigfunkychief]

Much appreciated! That worked great. Thanks!